From open data to open code: The Guardian launches Miso project

New for your reporter toolkit is code that will allow you to make data visualizations just like The Guardian.

The newly-launched Miso project is a series of software libraries that will allow journalists to tell stories visually by using open-source code provided in partnership by The Guardian and Boucoup, reports Journalism.co.uk. The first release of code is a JavaScript library called Dataset.

"The project embraces the idea that this year is the year that people are learning to code,” interactive lead at The Guardian Alastair Dant told Journalism.co.uk. “People have got to acknowledge you can't just press a button and have a visualization."

If the idea of coding is daunting, there are some push-button visualization tools out there, though. visual.ly is a new website that helps to create visual representations of data without any coding knowledge. Currently, you can upload your own infographic, or let visual.ly create one for you based on existing templates. I’ve embedded one below that tracks the life of the #JSC12 hashtag from this past weekend’s Journalism Strategies Conference in Montreal.

Using data for journalism will be on the agenda at this weekend’s CAJ conference, where David McKie, Glen McGregor and Fred Vallance-Jones will put on seminars on computer-assisted reporting techniques.

Check out more about the Miso project here. 

And as promised, the visual.ly infographic of JSC12, which I created simply by typing in the hashtag. (So, don't ask why Kai Nagata is a top naysayer, because I'm not sure why.)

create infographics with visual.ly